"First, the journalists working with the documents. I've handled some of the Snowden documents myself, and even though I'm a paranoid cryptographer, I know how difficult it is to maintain perfect security. It's been open season on the computers of the journalists Snowden shared documents with since this story broke in July 2013. And while they have been taking extraordinary pains to secure those computers, it's almost certainly not enough to keep out the world's intelligence services."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well.
Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades.
Call Center Employees
call-center
Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient.
Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you.
But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls.
Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves.
At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its "trending module" headlines - the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook's desktop version. The company backed away from a pure-algorithm approach in 2014 after criticism that it had not included enough coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in users' feeds."

"China's internet censors have cracked down on searches about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents that reportedly tie the relatives of current and retired Chinese politicians, including President Xi Jinping, to offshore companies used for tax evasion.
The reports by an international coalition of media outlets working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, are based on documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies."

"Documents claiming that Mariam Nawaz Sharif was only a trustee of the companies that bought the London flats, are dated February 2006, and appear to be typed in Microsoft Calibri.
But the font was only made commercially available in 2007, leading to suspicions that the Documents are forged."

"The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices."

"UK's electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world's biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America's top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal."

"The document dump reveals that the spies hold data on millions of Britons who are suspected of no wrongdoing, including records on dead people who cannot possibly pose a threat to national security. These records, which include "private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities," are safeguarded through self-regulating systems that are laughable in their tragic lack of seriousness. "

"Some £200m has been spent by the public sector on the computer giant's Office suite alone since 2010.
But the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude believes a significant proportion of that outlay could be cut by switching to software which can produce open-source files in the "open document format" (ODF), such as OpenOffice and Google Docs."

"The new documents reveal that a GCHQ unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, launched an operation called Rolling Thunder against the hacker collective in 2011. That operation included using DDoS attacks as well as malware to slow down the hackers and later identify them, as first reported by as reported by NBC News on Wednesday."

"Taken as a whole, the information Google collects about users is shockingly complete. The company can mine your emails and Drive documents, track your browsing history, track the videos you watch on YouTube, obtain your WiFi passwords and much more."

"Mounds of decaying air conditioners, piles of abandoned electronics and tenements built among the trash … Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon has documented the lives of residents of Dongxiaokou, a village outside Beijing and home to a large electronic-waste recycling centre, for a look at life amid the digital ruins"

"The type of tracking, called canvas fingerprinting, works by instructing the visitor's web browser to draw a hidden image, and was first documented in a upcoming paper by researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, the images can be used to assign each user's device a number that uniquely identifies it."

"The agency has invested nearly $80 million to build a computer that could break "nearly every kind of encryption," according to a Washington Post report published online Thursday. Based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Post reports the NSA is racing to build a "cryptologically useful quantum computer" research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets.""

"A leaked MPAA document discloses the studios' lobbyists' plan to force ISPs to give it control over DNS (one of the key goals in SOPA), by using the arguments raised in the decade-old Brand X case, where the ISPs said that they were more than a "telecommunications service" and were, instead, an "information service" because they provided DNS (among other things)."

"The "March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance," a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government's secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings."

"The most well-documented of these deals with the hash function used to "anonymize" the license and medallion numbers. A bit of lateral thinking from one civic hacker and the data was completely de-anonymized. This data can now be used to calculate, for example, any driver's annual income. More disquieting, though, in my opinion, is the privacy risk to passengers. With only a small amount of auxiliary knowledge, using this dataset an attacker could identify where an individual went, how much they paid, weekly habits, etc. I will demonstrate how easy this is to do in the following section."

"So they trained a deep-learning neural net on tons of examples of deepfaked videos, and produced a model that's better than any previous automated technique at spotting hoaxery. (Their paper documenting the work is here.)"